Astrobotany.com is very excited to announce a special collaboration with Magnitude.io.  Magnitude is a company that makes ExoLab, a network of laboratories that connects to a central lab on the International Space Station (ISS).  Magnitude has sent ten ExoLab missions to the ISS since 2017 and we are pleased to be able to collaborate with them on their upcoming mission: ExoLab-11: Astrobotany.  ExoLab-11 will send model legume M. truncatula to the ISS tentatively in early 2024.  We’ll be working with Magnitude to develop an open program that follows the journey of ExoLab-11 all the way from pre launch preparation to post return data processing.  We’ll be looking closely at the data and asking ourselves several questions: how can we grow legumes in space?  What experiments can we make to help us better understand legumes in space?  How will M. truncatula fare on the ISS?

Starting today, you can get up to speed with Magnitude and their work by visiting our dedicated collaboration page (see green button below).  From there, you can visit Magnitude’s classroom environment and get signed up for a free account to get ready for ExoLab-11’s launch and its accompanying curriculum.  We’ll be keeping you steadily updated with how the mission is progressing.  We’ll also be coming out with stellar lesson plans, and examining the data after the plants return to Earth.  This additional support and post flight analysis will be provided by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the Joint Genome Institute.  

This mission will not just be a valuable experiment for astrobotany, it will also be a first-of-its-kind experiment to try and perform large scale collaboration through Magnitude.io and Astrobotany.com.  We are so excited to build this team of citizen science astrobotanists- and are looking forward to working with you!  So now, there’s only one more thing left to say…

Let’s grow plants in space- together!